From Colorado To Louisiana

Continuing to write stories from my past to take my mind off the things that make me depressed I will write on about how I came to live in Louisiana...my grandchildren's home state.

From Colorado to Louisiana

As a college student, I moved to Lafayette, Louisiana in the fall of 1965  to live with my older brother Gary and to attend the University of Southwestern Louisiana.  My younger brother Doyle who had been living with our parents wanted to stay in one place for his senior year in high school, so he was there, too, and enrolled at Lafayette High School.  We lived at first with Gary in an efficiency apartment off College Street on Bacque Crescent.   There was only one room and a bathroom The room held two sofas and a table in one corner and in the opposite corner smaller than the bathroom was a kitchen nook with an all in one unit that included the sink, refrigerator, a stove burner and a drawer and cupboard. 

When I got there we spoke to the landlady about getting a bigger apartment because ours was too small, and since there was no other apartment available, she said we could break the six month lease if we would clean the place thoroughly before we moved out.  Driving around looking at apartments in Lafayette, I saw White Real Estate offices near four corners and when I went inside, the secretary gave me my first contact with a real Cajun accent.   I’d heard that accent before, but never to actually speak to someone who butchered the English language so nicely and called me ‘cha’.

The secretary told me that Mr. White did indeed have apartments and houses near the college campus.  My two brothers and I rented an upstairs apartment in a fourplex that had two bedrooms a bath, kitchen, and livingroom and was only about four blocks from USL.  I got the bedroom with the full sized bed and the boys got the one that had twin beds.  The place was a terrible mess and we worked hard to clean it and make it liveable like my mother always did when she’d found us a new place to live near the warehouse.  We made it look so nice that while we lived there Mr. White came, looked and made arrangements for the livingroom floor to be sanded and restained and varnished and for the carpet to be replaced in the hallway.

Louisiana was a wonderful place.  It was the fall and it rained almost every day.  The raindrops were warm!  Gary and I had gone to college in Greeley, Colorado and the weather was completely different there than in Louisiana.  In Colorado the winter weather brought snow.  In Louisiana it was so warm I never needed a coat.  When it rained, I just got wet and even then didn’t feel cold.  The winter was so mild to me that I wondered why the locals were ‘freezing’ and wore heavy coats when it was only about sixty five degrees outside.  

Our parents moved their little one bedroom trailer to Houston, Texas and on some weekends we would go ‘home’ to visit them in Gary’s car.  Sometimes we stayed at school because it was midterm testing time or one of us would have some kind of project or report to do.  We'd met Bob Miers on Mardi Gras (see the story following this one) and he stayed with us some days when he was on his 7 days off from his work on an offshore drilling rig.  One weekend we went to Houston to visit my parents and Bob went with us.  (My father was very angry that Bob had come there and said that Bob was my 'boyfriend' and that I was simply not admitting it.  Today I realize that there were reasons why my Dad disliked Bob, but back then, once again I think I must have been so rebellious that I decided that I would make Bob his son-in-law because my dad was wrong.  Although it was awhile before that happened, eventually it did, not because I was angry at my father but because Bob told me that he loved me and wanted to spend his life with me.)

One Saturday night Bob brought us back to visit his parents because his father was cooking “the best steaks” ever outside over charcoal.  I remember that Gary bought a huge sirloin steak about two inches thick over for Bob’s dad Homer to cook…and Homer made it taste absolutely wonderful…even though he called it “almost a whole cow”.  And Bob’s mother Irene fixed corn on the cob and tater tots and the best tasting, most simple salad and the coldest most wonderful iced tea I ever drank.  Bob showed us around Lafayette and introduced us  to “the strip”,  Voorhies Roof Garden and the Brass Rail.  On Sunday Lafayette was dry and Bob showed us the places to go outside of town to Breaux Bridge, Poor Boys and Paul’s Place, Mulate’s and Pat’s where you could drink with your dinner or dance or see a fight break out.  Gary had gone once to the Bayou Club on the Lafayette/St. Martin Parish line but by the time Doyle and I got to Lafayette that place had burned down.  We paid our cover charge and danced at all the other Cajun dance halls from Church Point to Butte La Rose on the  Henderson Levee.

At the end of our school year in May, Doyle had graduated and gone back home.  After Gary had a car wreck, he left Lafayette.  Bob, without Gary's transportation, wasn’t around much any more.  He did manage to get rides and introduced me to his friend Dukie that he'd gone to high school with, and I met his brother named Homer Sidney that everyone called Bunn who came from Las Vegas.  I got to know Robbie who married his girlfriend Jackie because couple lived close by at her mother's house.  And I met others of Bob’s friends including Virgil Dinsmore and Jerry (Dugas I think) who had a water well drilling company.  But it was quiet on the home front which gave me space to finish writing papers and study for final tests at the end of my junior year.  On the day of my last final test, Bob’s mother brought him by my house and he told me that he was going to go overseas on a drilling rig to Cameroon in Africa.  I gave him my address in Houston and the next day went with him and his mother to see Bob off at the airport.  School was finished and I packed and went to ‘home’ for the summer. 

Back in Houston, I did tell my mother that I was expecting to get a letter from Bob so I would know where I could write to him overseas, but it was quite awhile before I heard from him.  I went on about the business of getting a job at Reserve Life Insurance Company in the heart of downtown Houston and helping with a building project my mom was working on to attach a "cabana" room to the front side of their small trailer.  My brother Stan was there and Bryan, the baby but Gary and Doyle went to work for the summer on the pipelines.  After a few weeks, my mom and the baby went to join my dad on a job in Beatrice Nebraska and Stan stayed there with me.

It was a long summer but a fun one.    I was working every weekday, but it was never dull because Stan was ten...lots of fun to be around and he took good care of me and of mom’s house.  He always cleaned up after himself before he went to visit around the trailer park.  When I'd get home in the evening I’d find him over at a friends house or just coming in from his 'fishing hole'.  I cooked sometimes, but most of the time I tried to bring home some fast food or Stan and I would go out to eat.  On the weekends we'd go see a movie or go check out some fun place.  Some days we’d go visit my Aunt Denny and Uncle Narb, in fact some weekdays I’d go to work early and drop Stan (and his bicycle) off to visit while I worked the day then went back to pick him up in the evening.  I had grown up fun, reunited with a childhood friend, Jimmy Newbould who took me out dancing or sometimes or I would go dancing at one of Houston's clubs alone. And I wrote letters to Bob, who sent back one sentence letters to me, telling me what it was like living on a rig 14/7 or having his days off in a war-torn African country or making friends with the 'chef' who cooked for the men on the rig and the two of them deep sea fishing because he was bored.  He told me that he missed me and that when he came back to the USA he wanted to see me.  I don't remember him saying that he loved me, but I do remember him telling me how badly he wanted to be near me. Both his almost love of me and his life on the rig were exciting to hear about.  Bob worked for a company called Global Marine.  I have a picture of the rig he was on and will try to find it and make a digital copy and post it here.

At the end of  the summer Doyle let me know that he was coming down from Nebraska on a motorcycle he’d gotten and would be going to Lafayette to start college at USL.  He planned to be there for Memorial Day weekend.  Bob had been working overseas offshore from Cameroon and Nigeria.  On the very same weekend that Doyle was due to arrive, Bob came back from overseas and called me to come get him at Hobby Airport so he could visit with me on his way home to Lafayette.  When Doyle arrived the next day on his motorcycle, Bob was there.  

Doyle was so beat from his ride that he went to sleep.  Bob tried to teach me how to ride Doyle's bike, but I was not good at it and didn't know how to brake and almost clotheslined myself in my landlady's yard before he yelled at me how to stop the thing.  Needless to say, motorcycles have scared me ever since then.  When Doyle woke up, he complained that he never wanted to ride his motorcycle again. Bob had been trying to convince me to take him to Lafayette for the weekend instead of taking him back to Hobby to catch a plane home, so I suggested that Bob ride the motorcycle and I would take Doyle to Lafayette in my car...which we did.  I was supposed to be back to work on Monday morning even though it was a holiday for most everyone.  (My boss had promoted me and didn't want me to miss a single day of work because I had much catching up to do to be able to do both my new job and my old job.)  

The trip was too hard on my car, though, so on Saturday I ended up trying to find a mechanic who would fix it.  I did, but the mechanic wanted to keep the car until Monday afternoon.  I called my boss on Monday morning to tell him that I could not make it in to work until the next day and he told me that I was, of course, fired for not coming in to work...then informed me that I would still need to come back in to train someone new to take my job.  I called my parents and told them that I was in Lafayette and cried because I had gotten fired.  My father was very angry.  He informed me that I should not have taken the car he gave to me, his car, out of town, let alone across a state line!  He was very upset about Bob and told me that I should just give the car keys to my brother and not ever go back to the trailer in Houston.  

My dad sent my mother to Houston to go and be with Stan and she came over to Lafayette to get the car.  Instead of her taking that car back home, she came to Bob's house, talked to his parents and to me about whether Bob and I had been sleeping together and whether we were truly in love.  Bob told her that he loved me and that he would ask my Dad for my hand in marriage if he had come instead of her.  After that Mom drove me back to Houston and I took her to Hobby to fly back home.  (She had done what my Dad told her to do, but she didn't want to be long away from baby Bryan.)  From Houston, my mom said I needed to take Stan to Beatrice Nebraska so he would be able to start school there.  He and I drove for almost two days to get there, never stopping except to eat and get gas.  I remember reading in the paper the day after I got there that the roads we traveled had been closed due to flash flooding.  It had rained much of the trip, but going thru Nebraska the night skies were pretty clear...and we didn't see any flooding at all.  

My dad was still very angry at me and told me I should either denounce Bob or just get out of his house.  I retaliated by telling him that Bob and I were in love and were going to get married.  Bob had, after all said that he loved me and wanted to marry me, right in front of my mother.  Dad simply stomped out.  Then he sent my brother and my cousin over to ask me out to a dance.  The next day was just about the same only at the end of it he sent my sister to come and talk to me and tell me how I should not get married.  The next day was not quite the same.  My mom, apparently having had enough, and having decided that my dad's wishes were not going to come true took me shopping and bought me a pink lame suit and a white blouse and a new purse and shoes that matched then took me to the bus station and bought me a ticket to Wichita where she told me that her sister Leila would pick me up and take me to the airport to catch a flight back to Houston and on to Lafayette.  She paid for it all and let me know that I was not to tell my dad anything about the plan.  That night I simply went to bed early.  I don't know what she said to my dad...she never said. and the next day I took the bus that went to Wichita.